Alice Where Art Thou? by Cadell Elizabeth

Author:Cadell, Elizabeth [Cadell, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: The Friendly Air Publishing
Published: 2016-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

I don’t know what I looked like when I had grasped the significance of what Fergus had said.

I don’t even know how long it was that he stood there, or how long the others waited for my reaction. I was staring at a mental picture of myself lying on the floor of the bedroom, keeping very quiet so that Mr. Flower would not know that I was there. Mr. Flower . . .

“Don’t take it like that, Denny,” I heard Chess saying gently. “Maybe he’s ... I mean, he couldn’t have been too happy, could he, pushed around by his wife . . .”

Her words of consolation trailed away. Life with Mrs. Flower was a better thing than a knife in the back.

“I didn’t know you liked him so much,” Marya said, watching my face.

“I . . . When did you hear?” I asked them.

“Fergus was here in the flat, waiting for us,” said Marya. “Mrs. Flower let him have a key, because he wanted to be here when we came home; he wanted to tell us the news quietly, instead of letting other people tell us.”

“It was in the papers on Saturday,” Fergus said. “I felt pretty sure that none of you would see it; that is, I didn’t think you’d be reading the kind of paper that made it front page news. I saw it on a poster when I was out on Saturday morning, and I bought a paper and read about it. It didn’t say much: Mrs. Flower had been expecting him at the coffee bar, and he didn’t turn up. She sent someone round; the kitchen door wasn’t locked, and . . .”

Chess and Marya, I learned, on coming home earlier, had noticed nothing unusual about the house—except a policeman who seemed to be strolling aimlessly to and fro. But ten minutes after their arrival, a police officer had called and questioned them.

“All he wanted to know,” Chess said, “is where we all were on Friday afternoon. I told him. I said we’d all been at work until about five; then we’d all met at the station and gone down to stay with my mother and father. The Inspector, or whoever he was, thanked us and said he wouldn’t bother us again; he’d talked to the people in the middle flat and found they’d left the house early on Friday afternoon and gone down to the country.”

“Yes, I—”

I stopped. I had begun to say that I had seen them from the top of the bus—and then I remembered. Remembered that once I revealed that fact, I would be revealing everything: my free afternoon, which I had forgotten to mention to Chess and Marya; my presence in the flat. Even if I said nothing of Mr. Flower’s having been there too, it was more than likely that his wife, who had always made a point of knowing where he was and what he was doing, would remember that he had said something about fixing a washer.

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